I'd say it looks cool, but it's quite spendy unless you plan on making money with it. That and a good portion of my friends at school that are interested in making a game are linux users. So that ends up not being an option unless I want to work on it alone.

I agree that it does look quite nice, but 250? Pro for 1000? Torque sells for 100! Dim3 is free! Truly unless you are going to sell stuff with it, and probably plan on making multiple games, that might be a bit much for everyone. (unless you get a free liscene)

I'm interested in Unity. I've had pretty good results trying to get to grips with the demo, and I'm considering buying an Indie license unless I notice some terrible show-stopper in the tools. Scripting in C# seems easy enough, asset importing is very simple (I'm importing Blender models, and it just works perfectly). I'm really only playing with it, but I managed to put together a rough approximation of the Rescue spaceship flight model in about a couple of hours with no prior experience.

The biggest worry for me is the proprietary nature of Unity. If the OTEE guys go out of business and don't open the source or sell the code to some like-minded developer, anyone using the tools would be stuck if subsequent OS updates eventually break the tools. However, I think it's good for a few years at least, and nothing lasts forever in game development anyway.

On the other hand, it's clearly a benefit to be able to develop games without all the hardship of dealing with system APIs and tricky asset workflows. That's the most attractive thing for me.

Dark Helmet Wrote:I agree that it does look quite nice, but 250? Pro for 1000? Torque sells for 100! Dim3 is free! Truly unless you are going to sell stuff with it, and probably plan on making multiple games, that might be a bit much for everyone. (unless you get a free liscene)

$250 is a steal, but I doubt you'd ever see that.

Say you value your time very litte... $1 an hour... That gives you 250 hours to make your own complete game engine with something like Novodex, (how much is the commercial license for that anyways!?!?) streamlined asset importing, skinned bonned animations, normal mapping, level editors, pixel precise lighting, rag dolls, blah the list goes on... you get the idea. Those are the obvious things. Wait until you discover things like the Projector and what you could do visually with that. Anyways, Hah! Good luck. (And I think you should value your time more)

You can apply the same to the pro features, but I'll leave it to you to read what you get and fill in the blanks and use your calculator.

If you are interested in developing your own engine out of education reasons, that is reasonable. However, there is a different type of more creative education you can get with Unity. For instance, I had Unity's "engine" to stand on to play with (and get working) adaptable full 3d pathfinding. I have some ideas sketched down for how to get this even more optimized and work better, and even some crazy ideas how to get this automatic. I have ShaderLab to play with and think of new visual effects to implement. If I ever wanted, I could pull those techniques I learned out into my own engine. I'm not throwing my time away, here. You've got Mono to play with and all it's got, which is a lot. I guess it's similar to the debate between high level languages and C, I suppose.

Anyways, yeah my team is using Unity to develop our next game. I personally won a copy through uDevGames. We are going to be the first 3rd party to release a full game. (Go ahead and race us )

It is hard to come up with something bad to say about my experience with Unity so far. There are a few rough edges, and of course bugs do pop up. But what is thrilling is how passionate, kind, and motivated the OTEE developers are about existing problems and getting them fixed. They don't leave you hanging when you have an issue, small or big. I hear there is a lot coming soon with version 1.1...

Skorche Wrote:I'd say it looks cool, but it's quite spendy unless you plan on making money with it. That and a good portion of my friends at school that are interested in making a game are linux users. So that ends up not being an option unless I want to work on it alone.

There seem to be a "fresh crop" of neat people in the OTEE forums who are primarily artists looking for people to collaborate with using Unity.

I value my time, but I'm just finishing off paying for my PowerBook. $250 is pretty steep for a college freshman. Who knows? Maybe a financial aid check will be more than I need . Unity does look absolutely sweet though.

I wont pay more than 100-150$ for a mac only dev tool as of now (because my gains with games are still not serious enough to justify a much bigger investment).

I'd think about it if it was 200$ with cross platform. Plus, it's very very new, the project might not work, it might stop being supported, it's a risky investment. I'll wait and see other things developed in it.

Something to note: For those of you who are just getting out of college or have concerns about the cost of the product, please think about college credit cards with capped credit of $250-$500. It could be a good option for buying the app and paying it off over a few months. Just think...You can learn to develop through a new app and start establishing credit at the same time.

ProRattaFactor
(Retro-infused games for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Mac)

I think before a student spends $250 for a dev tool, he must have made at least $1000 from his shareware to justify the investment, so that he is confident that he can make some profits with games, and the increase in productivity obtained with the engine is justified. For the hobbyists it's a big expense. For firms that have a good grip of the market, it's a deal.